Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Antoinette Sandbach Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jackson]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, but I am saying that we have less than benign financial circumstances and, were his policy to be followed, the city of Birmingham might lose £54 million in income through the new homes bonus. There are other ways in which we can toughen protections for the green belt, while allowing discretion for some exceptional sites. I made the point in my intervention that 216,000 homes had already been placed in emerging and completed local plans in the green belt by March. I accept that there is a problem, but I am not convinced that this amendment will sort the issue out.

In reducing the income stream and funding to local planning authorities, the perverse ramification may well be that those hard-pressed authorities cannot therefore put in the effort to properly manage well-funded speculative developers with their land grabs. There might also be an impact on rural housing schemes, which are very important and necessary for many of my hon. Friends.

For those reasons, I ask my right hon. and hon. Friends—I think they have already acceded to my request—not to push these matters to a vote. Ministers will have heard the points that have been raised on both sides of the House and will correctly identify methods to ameliorate the problems that have been raised.

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

I rise to speak to new clause 2 tabled in my name and to support new clauses 7 and 8 tabled in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert).

The aim of new clause 2 is to permit the Secretary of State to impose what would in effect be penalty costs on appeal. My constituency of Eddisbury has a wealth of picturesque villages, located in the most beautiful settings and with excellent schools. These villages are now finding that they are the target of a large number of planning applications, which are often totally against the emerging or adopted neighbourhood plan.

In Cheshire West and Chester, which has a five-year land supply, the council has rightly turned down those applications as being against the neighbourhood plan, yet developers persist in appealing. Local councils and the Planning Inspectorate have to spend valuable resources dealing with appeals that fall squarely against the ambitions and the principles of the neighbourhood plan.

My local parish councils, just like those in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs, have embraced neighbourhood planning. They have committed months of work—sometimes even years of work—to this and have relished the fact that they can bring forward a mix of housing that includes, for example, first-time starter homes as well as executive homes. They want to see starter homes, so that people can get on to the housing ladder and live in the community in which they have grown up, and they want to see smaller homes—bungalow-style homes—for the older people in my constituency who want to downsize. Given the part of Cheshire in which we live, developers invariably build five-bedroom executive homes. My local parish councils have relished the fact that they can plan for a mix of homes that allows for a varied community and enables people to remain in the community in which they have lived and grown up.

Like Arundel and South Downs, we have seen an increased offer and an increased acceptance of housing coming forward. None the less, we still see attempts by developers to drive a coach and horses through those neighbourhood plans. The aim of the new clause is to ensure that there is a financial disincentive in respect of appeals. It raises the prospect of a serious financial penalty for those developers seeking to have a go, as it was described in earlier contributions.

Constituents feel that their rural villages are under siege and that, at every point, their wishes as expressed and adopted in neighbourhood plan are being ignored. The new clause seeks to allow the full recovery of costs, with an additional punitive element, where it is clear that the refusal has been on the basis of the application being against the local neighbourhood plan. These speculative appeals impact on local council resources, and developers constantly feel that they can effectively try to push and break the plan, and it is deeply frustrating.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

My hon. Friend is speaking for many of us whose councils are constantly abused by the disgraceful behaviour of house builders. In my constituency—I intend to deal with the matter at some length—they have spent a very great deal of time and money trying to undermine the local plan.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

It becomes almost a war of attrition. The behaviour of developers appears to be designed to break local neighbourhood plans, so that they can drive through their ambitions, which ignore the wishes of local people and go against the commitment shown by local communities in producing those plans.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is my constituency neighbour. As we are in the same part of Cheshire, I can confirm everything that she is saying. Does she share my concerns that, as things stand, planning law is stacked far too much in favour of the developers and that there are not enough tools in the armoury of local authorities and neighbourhood plans to resist them?

[Antoinette Sandbach]

That is the very reason that I tabled new clause 2. I wanted to give the Secretary of State an additional power in relation to costs when developers try to drive a coach and horses through neighbourhood plans. That is also why I support new clauses 7 and 8 tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I agree with much of what my hon. Friend says. When she drew up her new clause, did she think about encouraging the planning inspector to award costs to the local authority where the developer was turned down at appeal and the conditions in her new clause were met? I have one case in my constituency where the council had to pay the developer’s costs, even though the council had won.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. That seems a very strange case indeed. I am aware that councils often do not apply for costs and, when they do, they get only a proportion of their costs back, not their full costs. By tabling the new clause, I hope to give additional powers to rectify that position and to discourage developers from such behaviour.

The Minister will be aware that I have campaigned long on this issue because of the actions of developers in my constituency. I know that there are issues affecting the Cheshire East half of my constituency, which does not have a local plan. Where communities have worked hard and put in place their neighbourhood plans, it is deeply frustrating for them to be put at risk because the methodology for calculating the five-year housing land supply was not correct. It seems ironic that Cheshire East used exactly the same methodology as Cheshire West and Chester, whose five-year land supply was accepted, yet that of Cheshire East was not. I can only assume that that is because there was no build-out of the housing that was described in earlier contributions.

I support new clause 8 because where a defect in the five-year supply is caused by the failure of developers to build out that causes the problem. The council has granted planning permission, but the developments are not being started. For those reasons, I support these new clauses.

[Philip Davies]

I should say in passing that I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) on her new clause 2, and with my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on new clause 7. I particularly agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) on amendment 29. He is absolutely right and he may or may not know that I faced exactly the same situation in Bradford as he did in Sutton Coldfield. The Minister has put a stop on the core strategy plan of Bradford Council, but I hope for a much more favourable outcome from those deliberations than my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield received. I assure my hon. Friend the Minister that I will feel equally aggrieved should the decision be as it was in Birmingham.

I want to speak about new clause 1, and in doing so I should begin by referring people to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) made it clear once again that he is the biggest devotee in the House of Donald Trump. He quoted him, as he usually does, when he referred to fixed odds betting terminals as the “crack cocaine of gambling”. Anybody who knows anything about this subject knows that the term was first used by Donald Trump in the 1980s to refer to video keno games, which he saw as a threat to his casino businesses. Ever since he first used the phrase, any new form of gambling—in fact, every new form of gambling—has been referred to at various times as the “crack cocaine of gambling”. That has included casinos themselves at certain points and lottery scratchcards—name any form of gambling, and I can point to somebody who has called it the crack cocaine of gambling. So, of course, fixed odds betting terminals have been called the same—not because they are considered to be that, but just because the same old phrase is trotted out every time we have a new form of gambling.